Saturday, September 30, 2017

"New Study Suggests Not Sharing Laughter is an Early Sign of Psychopathy"

Who's laughing now?
No, seriously, who's laughing? You can probably scratch them off your "they might be a sociopath list".

From Sputnik:

A new study from
British researchers has found that along with compulsive lying,
narcissism and a failure to return video tapes on time, one telltale
sign of a psychopath is that they do not share laughter with others.

The
team out of University College London studied 92 boys between the ages
of 11 and 16. Thirty were a control group, while 62 had exhibited
"disruptive behaviors" such as aggression, violence, lying,
manipulation, enjoyment of Huey Lewis and The News, and a lack of guilt
or a lack of concern. Many of these are the same signs as antisocial
personality disorder (ASPD) according to the Mayo Clinic.

After controlling for IQ, age, ethnicity,
socioeconomic status and even what their dominant hand was, the boys
were subjected to the experiment. Each was hooked up to an MRI and asked
to listen to recordings of genuine laughter, forced laughter and forced
crying. On a scale of one to seven, the boys were asked "How much does
hearing the sound make you feel like joining in and/or feeling the
emotion?" and "How much does the sound reflect a genuinely felt
emotion?"

The boys who demonstrated the early warning signs for ASPD were less
likely to laugh at both genuine and forced laughter. In addition, the
MRI revealed that the "disruptive" boys showed less neural activity
in response to the laughter and crying than the control group.

The purpose of this experiment was to show that laughter is a social
cue, and most people will laugh or smile when another person around them
does the same....MORE